After the Sunset is the type of movie I just want to beg people to stay away from. I want to stand in front of the theater entrance and block it with my body. Then smack them for laughing at the most obvious and thoughtless humor. And for the finale, ignore people who outright recommend it to others but knock unconscious those who smile at you and say, “it’s alright.” This movie is far from alright. It’s a dreary embarrassment for some talented actors who, for some reason, further the cause for director Brett Ratner to continue making movies in the interim from his Rush Hour successes. It’s time to put a stop to this.

It’s hard to say which conduit projects show less signs of branching out, Ratner’s “directorial” efforts (The Family Man, Red Dragon) or the films Brosnan signs on to in-between those little Bond films. That’s a hard choice. Considering Ratner has displayed no significant talent whatsoever, the hammer probably has to fall on the Pierce since his roles are little more beyond the suave, handsome demeanor that he was born and blessed with. That doesn’t mean his remake of The Thomas Crown Affair or maybe his most stellar performance to date in The Tailor of Panama were anything short of entertaining. But it does make his one-degree turn in After the Sunset all the more grating.

Brosnan plays master thief Max Burdett, an amalgamation of the characters he’s played much better before. He’s got the gadgets of James Bond, the thrill-seeking sensibility of Thomas Crown and the unshaven appearance of the one-and-only Remington Steele. Along with a pair of tits named Lola Cirillo (Salma Hayek), he has managed to rip-off a pair of diamonds under rather sketchy circumstances. His latest consists of an all-too circumstanced lifting right under the nose of FBI agent Stan Lloyd (Woody Harrelson) which will lead him into retirement if not into boredom.

Lola’s own retirement is a three-fold plan to have sex with Max as often as possible, remind him to write his vows and beg him not to consider one more heist. That proposition gets tough when Agent Lloyd comes down to the islands, suspicious of Max’s true intentions to sit in the sun, while a cruise ship is slated to dock with the third of the Napoleon diamonds on display. Now, call me crazy, but is it a rather brainy idea to just flaunt the final rock in the set for vacationing tourists when the other priceless artifacts have been stolen? That seems like bad intelligence.

What an understatement for the screenplay by Paul Zbyszewski, a writer for TV’s defunct Weakest Link game show. To paraphrase a far greater expert in the heist genre, David Mamet, After The Sunset is like having Elmore Leonard puke and then that puke wrote the script. Not one ounce of cleverness or sense exists in the plotting, characters or twists. Agent Lloyd’s bargaining chip in his plot with Max is a bullet that Lola kept from the last robbery that would put them at the scene of the crime. The concept alone is idiotic, but even moreso when the evidence is disposed of so quickly that Stan never, EVER mentions it.

Even the final heist wouldn’t pass mustard on a cancelled MacGyver ripoff and I’ve seen the outlandish effort that went into making us believe that the Declaration of Independence could be stolen in Nicolas Cage’s latest disaster. The climactic payoff is so unsatisfying at just the basic “neat” level that Brosnan actually looks directly at the camera and says “Don’t leave” as if pleading with the audience not to get up early and walk away because he swears there’s one more twist coming; one alluded to earlier for those paying attention but obviously reshot and discarded to the alternate ending section of the DVD. Actually, it’s more of a pinch than a full twist but the filmmakers are so deluded with how uncrafty it is that they play the “reminder game” for the people who came in on the short bus.

The most staggering query to come out of After The Sunset remains how in the hell Brosnan manages to finagle his leading ladies to regress themselves nearly immediately after making themselves “respectable?” Think about it. Halle Berry wins an Oscar for Monster’s Ball. Next she’s playing the traditional skinned-up Bond girl in Die Another Day. Salma Hayek throws away the vanity and money to play Frida Kahlo, earning an Oscar nomination and now she’s back to luscious kooch candy, screwing Brosnan more often than honeymooners on Cinemax. Hell, even Jamie Lee Curtis broke her no-nudity clause in The Tailor of Panama. OK, so it was with Geoffrey Rush, but I bet she was thinking of Pierce at the time. Is he the devil?

More notably, who does the former director of Mariah Carey and Madonna videos have pictures of raping farm animals that he continues to get gigs? This same jackass who allowed Chris Tucker to run rampant with racial jokes in Rush Hour 2, uses homosexual gags on multiple occasions as this one’s major guffaw inducer. Watch Brosnan and Harrelson rub lotion on each other and sleep in the same bed. Hardy-wa-wa-snicker-fister. I’m so enraged that I am demanding proof that Don Cheadle’s paycheck went directly into funding some independent project or to charity. Why should we pay to see a film that gives terrific character actors like Mykelti Williamson, Troy Garity, Michael Bowen, Rex Linn and Chris Penn less screen time than Karl Malone, Gary Payton and Shaq? According to Agent Lloyd, the world is divided by two people – “those who watch the sunsets and those who don’t.” That should be rather comforting to those in the red and the blue states, but not to me. I tend to think the world is divided by those who give crap like After The Sunset a pass and those who yearn to take a direct crap on it.